SummaryWhen John Wilkes Booth fired his derringer point blank into President Lincoln's head, he set in motion a series of consequences that would upend the lives of ordinary Americans for generations to come.

Lincoln's Final Hours tells the stories of the ordinary people caught up in an extraordinary evening in American history, an evening that would tilt the rest of their lives.

The intended consequences of Booth's split-second action included a fortuitous marriage, a public death outside Smithsonian Castle and a high-society murder that rocked Albany, N.Y.